WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton has a message for Donald Trump: keep on talking.
She’s just weeks away from wrapping up the Democratic presidential nomination, and friends, aides and supporters describe a candidate who isn’t particularly rattled by what she expects will be Trump’s increasingly direct attacks on her marriage and husband’s personal indiscretions.
In fact, Clinton believes that she can turn Trump’s deeply personal assaults to her benefit, they say, particularly among suburban women who could be crucial to her hopes in the fall. Her plan is never to engage in any back-and-forth over the scandals. Instead, she’ll merely cast him as a bully and talk about policy.
“I don’t care what he says about me, but I do resent what he says about other people, other successful women, who have worked hard, who have done their part,” she told an audience in Louisville, Kentucky, this month.
Trump has made clear that nothing is off-limits. He described one of the allegations of past sexual misconduct involving Bill Clinton as a rape.
“It’s all fair,” Trump told The Associated Press last week.
He drew a distinction between his own personal history, which includes three marriages and public admissions of infidelity, with that of the former president.
“He was the president of the United States when certain things happened,” he said. “My stuff is nothing when you take a look, in terms of a comparison.”
Clinton said she wouldn’t respond to those kinds of attacks. “That’s exactly what he’s fishing for,” she told CNN.